\n<\/p>\n
A farmer in rural India takes a photo of a dying plant. She wants to research it on the internet but she doesn\u2019t speak English. She shouldn\u2019t have to.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the type of problem a nonprofit called Current AI<\/a> is trying to solve by building open, public AI infrastructure. In February at the India AI Summit, it teamed up with Bhashini<\/a>, the Indian government\u2019s AI language division. The result became Suno Sutra, Hindi for \u201clistening chronicles,\u201d a pocket-sized, offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages, no internet required. \u201cIn India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,\u201d Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said in an interview with TechCrunch. The device is open-sourced, available for developer communities to build on.<\/p>\n The nonprofit, founded in February 2025<\/a> by Martin Tisne, is moving fast. Last month, it allocated $3.2 million in grants to projects across four organizations; most recently (last week) it launched an open-source AI chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva<\/a>. \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n Bdeir, joined in January after leading Mozilla\u2019s AI strategy. She previously founded littleBits, the STEM education company that reached millions of kids before selling to Sphero in 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n Current AI operates as a \u201cpublic-private partnership\u201d bringing together governments, companies, and philanthropies to fund public interest tech, she told TechCrunch. \u00a0The French government seeded Current AI with $100 million, joined by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce \u2014 bringing total committed funding to $400 million. \u201cThey\u2019re not investors; they\u2019re funders,\u201d Bdeir said.<\/strong><\/p>\n The problem it aims to solve is straightforward: every major AI system today, from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic, belongs to a private company. \u201cIf AI is truly a transformative technology, if it\u2019s going to change every aspect of everyone\u2019s life, there has to be a public alternative,\u201d Bdeir said. \u201cLike the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.\u201d<\/p>\n Half the world\u2019s spoken languages face extinction<\/a>. \u201cAnd with English driving the largest language models and AI systems, a bulk of the world\u2019s languages and, consequently, cultures and communities are left behind,\u201d Bdeir said.<\/p>\n When asked about Big Tech\u2019s multilingual push, Bdeir drew a sharp distinction. \u201cBig tech builds multilingual models to expand their market,\u201d she said, \u201cregardless of consent or context.\u201d The consequences are concrete. \u201cFor Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n An AI\u2019s ability to speak a language is only part of what it needs to learn. \u201cLanguage is how knowledge, tradition, memory and identity get carried from one generation to the next. So when a technology can\u2019t speak your language, it can\u2019t hold your culture either,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Her vision for Current AI is an open system modeled on the early web, where improvements benefit everyone, no one gets locked out, and communities keep control of their own data.<\/p>\n Current\u2019s first cohort grant round, announced last month, involved deploying $3.2 million to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon. <\/p>\n The project in Masakhane, Kenya, involves building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education; Lebanon\u2019s Institute for Worldmaking is digitizing Arab cultural history and contemporary practice into machine-readable databases that communities (not tech companies) control. Brazil\u2019s Portal sem Porteiras is building offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, keeping data within the territory. And Kenya\u2019s African Internet Rights Alliance is developing audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent.<\/p>\n On the question of data ownership, Bdeir didn\u2019t mince words. \u201cThere are different models and proposals for who owns data in various communities, but one thing is sure: it shouldn\u2019t be a company in Silicon Valley trying to make a select few thousand people wealthier,\u201d she told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n The nonprofit\u2019s approach is to store models and data locally, bringing in community experts before anything is built, or writing consent protocols into the pipeline so communities can halt the process at any point.<\/p>\n None of Current AI\u2019s grantees have fully solved it yet. But Bdeir sees that as the point. \u201cEvery one of them has built the question into their work,\u201d she said, \u201crather than accepting the usual default, where complexity becomes the excuse to let a government or a tech company decide for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n As for how much progress can be made with a $3.2 million budget split across four organizations, Bdeir says, \u201cScale is not always the measure. That is the Big Tech paradigm,\u201d she said. \u201cThis could look like an Indigenous elder in the Brazilian Amazon using a tool built in Kenya to be able to pass down ecological knowledge in their own language.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n Earlier this month in Geneva, Current launched Alpha Chat<\/a>, an open-source chatbot<\/a> assembled in seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. Each contributor brought a piece of the stack, including a language model, safety tooling, and computing power.<\/p>\n Current AI also struck a deal with Sakana AI<\/a>, a Tokyo-based startup known for its work on what it calls Sovereign AI. The two organizations plan to build a shared open-source AI stack, one designed to support the Japanese language and culture, but also communities across the Global South that dominant AI systems have largely ignored.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\nNot just about language<\/h2>\n
Who owns the data?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Building the stack<\/h2>\n